


A Conductor of Lightning

by Bitenomnom



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, BAMF John, Gen, Isolation, John in Afghanistan, M/M, Moral Ambiguity, PTSD, Psychosis, cultural dissonance, dark!john
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-02-07
Updated: 2013-02-27
Packaged: 2017-11-28 12:07:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,651
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/674234
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bitenomnom/pseuds/Bitenomnom
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In August 2009, John Watson was sent back to London with an injury and the memory of eight of his closest friends dying around him. Now, he is lost for what to do with himself as he finds he is unable and unwilling to rejoin civilian society. He's also very alone -- that is, at least, until he is contacted by an old acquaintance from training: Sebastian Moran.</p>
<p>AU in which John is in London for half a year before meeting Sherlock Holmes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I've been mulling over this one for a couple months now (since writing [Elimination of Dummy Variables](http://archiveofourown.org/works/532836), not that this is just like or even totally based on that story) and decided it's time I sit down and write it. 
> 
> I also want to add the disclaimer that no matter how much I may try to educate myself, I am still very very far from knowledgeable about anything military (and especially British military), and invite anyone who knows more than I do who finds something off to let me know so that I can try to fix it (or at least file it away for future reference). I do the best that I can with my research but there's always gonna be something I don't think of or don't understand.  
> My reference for John's career is [this excellent meta](http://wellingtongoose.tumblr.com/post/30681523063/semantics2).
> 
> Finally, a big thank-you to the two lovely betas I have for this story, [Morwen_Eledhwen](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Morwen_Eledhwen/pseuds/Morwen_Eledhwen) and [Chucksauce](http://archiveofourown.org/users/chucksauce/pseuds/chucksauce).

           He feels his skin freezing to his face.

            No, no—it isn’t freezing; it is boiling. The white in his eyes isn’t a tundra but the center of an explosion, an explosion that rocks the sand beneath him and sucks him in like the great collapse of a trampoline beneath his feet, seducing his knees into buckling and for one entire, perfectly silent second, absorbing him.

           And then he bounces, and he hears shrill screams and feels what might just as easily be skin peeling from beneath his cheeks and from the curve of his exposed shoulder as it could be grains of sand working their way in. Like camera lens irises his eyes widen and contract to capture the images of three faces as disbelieving as his own. He lets his weight carry him to the ground, his top half falling behind what may have once resembled a wall, and curls his arms over his head, and imagines each crackling end to a shriek is a signal for the end of the horror.

            But it isn’t.

 

  
            John wakes up alone.

            He wakes up alone exactly as he had done two months and six days ago, but this time he is in a bed, in a bedsit, in London, and not in the remains of a village north of Lashkar Gah, shoulder shot and half burned to naught, and surrounded by the dead bodies of men and women he used to call his family. He _still_ calls his family.

            He can’t call his family.

            There is nothing he can tell them. Well, nothing his mother could want, being dead; nothing his father would want to have to do with him. Nothing his sister won’t just drink away anyway.

            And the others, the ones who had _mattered_ , are dead.

            Today is John’s twenty-second day back in London.

            Inevitably he wakes up every morning, whether he wants to or not. The bedsit is full of stifling silence, a mirror to the moment before the explosion in his nightmares. He’ll pull out the mobile that Harry gave him upon his return as some sad excuse for an apology for something she wasn’t responsible for, so that she can stop mourning John’s loss and stop thinking about John’s loss and stop talking to John, which is fine, really, because they had nothing to say to one another. He’ll pull out the mobile, turn it over in his hands and stare at it for a while, and then put it back down.

            Not that he and Harry hadn’t been close, once—but that was ages ago. Maybe it was only a few years ago, in London time. In Afghanistan, time was its own petty and petulant and unpredictable being. It existed in the vacuum, unaware of the rest of the world, and passed at its own place. Half the time, entire months whipped by in days. Half the time, blinks were years. John squeezes his eyes shut and lays the mobile on his desk. The balance must have favored blinking, there. He may as well have come back twenty years older. He runs his hands over his face. Maybe he is.

            But at least there’s London.

            He told them that no one would do but Dr. Ella Thompson for his therapy. They made sure he’d be able to see her whenever he needed.

            She’s rubbish.

            John wonders if she actually believes that he will one day be able to reflect on his service without feeling the sort of acute loss that sucks the breath out of him, without the use of anything other than drugs or alcohol. Or maybe she knows better; maybe she doesn’t believe it for a minute. Maybe they are both playing. Maybe she knows full well that all she is for John is a tool to keep him here in the only place that can keep him sane.

            Today, he’ll go for another walk. Or maybe he’ll ride around on the tube for a while, make his way into the center of the city, navigate through swarms of tourists. He can observe these strange creatures, their Union Jack bags and designer jackets, their chatter. He can sit on a bench and hear accents, and hear languages he can’t understand. He can go to the Piccadilly Circus and let couples ask him to take their photo. It’s likely to be the only shooting he’ll be doing anytime soon. John collapses into this desk chair and pulls the desk drawer open, letting his fingers linger over this Browning on their way to his laptop. It is definitely the only kind of shooting he can talk about in polite company, which is all the company he’s ever going to have, because god knows you have to be polite to a man who’s lost his entire section serving Queen and Country.

            He’s never going to see any of them again.

            John had considered, as always, the possibility that not all of them were going to make it to the end of that mission. But he had spent most of his time assuming he would be one of them. They called him Two Ticks Watson because that was about how long it took him to get to the front in a dangerous situation (which was all of them, really)—“Get back here; you’re our bloody doctor!” one of them would say, but not there, he wasn’t.  He was a soldier, too. And in their downtime he’d shown them enough of what they needed to know.

            Not, it seemed, that it was ever meant to matter. There are no especially effective ways to repel a chain of explosions peppered with gunfire, except to be really damned lucky.

            John was very lucky. He is also the least lucky person he knows. Not that he particularly knows anyone. Not that he really plans on changing that, either. He isn’t sure what he is going to _do_ ; but he’s been home but twenty-two days, so he has time to decide yet. Ella suggested he apply for some locum medical work. “Get yourself feeling useful again,” she said, because if she got one thing right, it was how intensely useless John feels. He lays his laptop on his desk and opens it.

            He’d considered it, even. He certainly needs the money. And the sooner he can support himself, the sooner he can stop lying that he wants to keep seeing Ella, just to make sure he can stay in London.

            The thing of it is, though, that it would involve a lot more paperwork than John ever wants to see again. He wants to be out in the field and to _do,_ and it is highly unlikely that he’d feel anything like as useful as he needed to, telling people that all they have is the sniffles and they’d just have to wait it out. John smirks wryly to himself as he checks his email. He could try to make his way toward working in an A&E. “Hey, boss,” he’d say, if he were a prima donna doctor, “I’m only seeing burns and bullet wounds today. Send the boring poison ingestion cases to someone else.”

            Right.

            John pushes his chair back beneath the desk. Nothing new today, no emails, no messages of any sort—no surprises there. Who’s going to email him? Who’s going to call him? Who does he have to talk with? John draws up his cane and stands.

            Ella said his limp was a manifestation of his grief for his fallen comrades. John knows this is bullshit. John’s leg had felt like it caught fire, in that explosion, although the burns hadn’t been nearly all that bad; maybe it was the way his knees had buckled before he hit the ground that exacerbated it. Maybe it was the shot that had grazed his lower thigh just before the explosion. Either way, it has recovered much more now than the pain John feels would seem to imply; there is no good physical explanation for the pain being there. And the psychological explanation _isn’t_ mourning. It is because of Afghanistan’s warped sense of time. His leg is stuck in that bubble. Nothing has popped him out of it yet; nothing has freed his mind from residing there. The last thing that mattered was that explosion, its heat grazing his leg when he threw his torso behind a crumbled wall. After that, what are train rides? What are lonely trips for takeaway? Muted things. Dream-things. He is waiting to return to that moment. His leg holds his spot for him.

            John pauses beside his desk for several moments before reaching back into this drawer for his gun. He tucks it into the back of his trousers and dons a jacket to cover it, locking his door on the way out and pocketing his keys.

            He’ll ride around in the Tube a while, exiting at random to make a lap around the station or to transfer to a different line. Probably, he ought to be looking up nearby clinics.

            Probably, he ought to be trying to move on.

            But like hell was that’s going to happen. Maybe, one day, he’ll be distracted enough by something or another to go a while without thinking about them; there is no moving on, only pushing to the back. John wonders if he could box those memories up like crates in his mind, shove them someplace other than just behind his eyes. He wonders if he’d do it willingly, or if he might just wait for it to happen on its own. Forgetting them would be doing them a disservice.

            Today, he is going to go to the Princess Louise. He thought of the name of the pub the way Holt would say it, the way John heard him say it about a hundred times during their service. He’d say it with the sort of nostalgic grin that could only mean he’d once fucked someone in a toilet stall there. He’d breathe out the phrase like he’d been holding in a little air from the place at the bottom of his lungs, in reserve, and had decided to share it with John.

            John’s been avoiding it, maybe, a little—putting it off, to sweeten it. Except that there is no sweetening it—more, he’d hoped the visit would be a well-cultured and cultivated bitterness. It won’t be, today, though—it’ll be too raw. But he’ll go back, in a month, or in a year, or in ten years, and the raw pain he lays down in his memory now would mature, and deepen, and he’ll wear treads into it every time he visits.

            It’ll be a more private gravesite, an unassuming one, where he can reflect on his time with Holt without a thousand other dead bodies and flowers cluttering up his peripheries. He can imagine another life, where he and Holt finish their service, or where at least they are both sent home alive, can imagine ringing him up. “Hey, you stupid arse, it’s Tuesday, did you forget?”

            Holt would say something like, “Wasn’t it just Tuesday last week?” and then he’d proceed to lay out their plans for the day like marching orders, and John would feel his ears warm and his body soften at the familiarity and the comfort of it.

            In that universe, in that world, John would go to the Princess Louise with Holt and they’d have a pint or four and Holt would tell a story about how he almost died in a flight to Oslo, which John knew only meant there was a bit of turbulence. And Holt would know he knew, and go on anyway, and then he’d lean back and peer around the partition, and grin the way he did, and breathe out, “The Princess Louise.”

            John would be there with him, in one of his favorite places in the world, in that universe.

            Here, he can only settle for coming after. But someone has to do it, someone has to visit for him, and John is the only one who can, and he has bitterness to steep and brew there.

 

  
            The difference, John thinks, between what Ella is right now and what Ella could be, which is a reasonably good therapist, is if she could just realize the problem with _friends_.

            The Princess Louise was a brilliant pub, but John had meant to go for dinner and had lost his patience and gone for lunch instead. Now, as dinnertime actually approaches, the sky is dimming and he is no more at peace than he was when he went in. He makes widening laps when he leaves, an outward spiral with Holt’s favorite pub at the center.

            The place is even better, after having heard Holt’s stories; better, borrowing his memories. John’s steps and clicking cane are quick, determined; his brows are folded down. He should have been able to come here with Holt. He should have shared that memory. They should’ve gone in at noon and forgotten about time and left when they got kicked out at eleven at night. That should’ve been _theirs_. Holt should’ve been—

            He continues on his arcing path, the wide circles taking him farther away the slowest he could possibly go, even as he walked his quickest, even as he felt steam leave his nostrils at the absolute _crime_ that was the loss of his friend.

            But Ella doesn’t have any idea, does she? About what makes Holt, or Linton, or Durand a different sort of friend than any sort he’s ever had or will ever have again. Or she knows, probably—but only in a textbook way, which means fuck-all as far as John is concerned, but he can’t blame it on her.

            “Ran into a mate from the rugby team way back in sixth form,” he’d finally told her, once, when she’d prodded and pried about his week.

            “What did you talk about?” she asked.

            “Rugby.”

            “Anything else?”

            The bloke had asked what John was doing with a cane, anyway, and were they really getting that old? “You get hurt or something, mate?” he’d asked.

            “Yeah,” John said.

            “How?”

            “Shot,” he said, and at the man’s gaping mouth, specified, “army.”

            “Cor,” he said. “Really?”

            John nodded.

            “Must’ve hurt pretty awful,” he said, “if _you’re_ feeling it. You’d get your nose smashed in and hardly make a peep.”

            “Yeah,” said John. It was a psychosomatic limp. His leg was holding his place for him, in battle, in Afghanistan, in Afghanistan-time. It was all in his head. It hurt like hell.

            He didn’t say anything else. The other man shifted his weight back and forth, as if reassuring himself that he had full use of both his legs. “Anyway,” the man said, finally, “I’ve got—er. Gotta get going.”

            “Right.”

            “Good to see you.”

            “Sure.”

            “Bye.”

            “Bye.”

            And that was that.

            John’s chin lifted at Ella. “That was about it, really.”

            “Hm,” she’d said, as if this had puzzled her. “Have you met with any of your other friends from before your service?”

            “No.”

            “Why not?”

            There are a thousand reasons why not, but they mostly boil down to things like nobody looking him in the eye, things like people thinking the war was _over there_ and therefore had no reason to be mentioned _over here_ , where it mostly just makes people feel a little itchy, a little guilty, for John being there and losing men and conscience while they’ve been here building things like businesses and families.

            Over here time is months-in-days, not so much blinking, not so many years. Over here, a week passed. In Afghanistan, John blinked away sand and blinked away blood and blinked away tears and years and years and years went by.

            John wants to sputter about the time Poole almost stole some woman’s rug because he wanted something nice to wipe his arse on, but that’s not the Done Thing and no one will get it, anyway, because no one knew Poole and Poole never shot anyone down for them. No one patched up Poole’s leg. No one watched Poole suck his thumb when he slept. No one nearly fucking died a hundred times beside Poole. No one took shutter-shots of his shocked face just before the bomb took him.

            And compared to that, compared to patching Poole up, compared to musing with Holt how much piss might taste like beer to someone who can’t taste anything but sand anyway, what, really, is the weather? What are celebrities? Nothing. Nothing.

            “Nothing to talk about.”

            “What did you talk about before?”

            It’s been twenty years, hasn’t it? There is no before.

            It’s been five years since he left England.

            “Not sure.” Stupid things, when they weren’t medical things. Football teams and girls. Politics. Boring things.

            What Ella doesn’t understand is that there is something that this man, who used to be John’s friend, years ago, does not know. There’s something he doesn’t know that anyone John would’ve considered a friend now, were they alive, but god, they aren’t, and he hasn’t exactly run across any other soldiers—does. Many somethings.

            If John had gone to the Princess Louise with Holt, they probably would’ve spent half an hour in complete silence, stuck in Afghanistan-time, and it wouldn’t have mattered, because they’d both know what the other was thinking. They’d gulp their pints down and meet each other’s eyes and they’d both be thinking, _I’d fucking mow anyone down who came for you, buddy,_ and, _I know you would, because you already have, smartarse._ And they wouldn’t have to say it; they’d just know, with the faint thud of their glasses hitting the table empty, with that spark passing between their eyes. Because they were friends, and that’s what friends are. And that is what Ella doesn’t understand.

            John walks in wider circles.  
           

  
  
            By the time he’s crossed North Gower Street, it’s dark out.

            John considers going back to the pub. It’s the only thing he’s really done today; if he goes home now, what’ll he have made of himself today? But at least he went for Holt. That was something worthwhile. Best not to spoil it by going back now, where the still-raw bitterness he’d tried to leave there with him would rub against him, buffet against his eyes and skin.

            He’d seem awfully desperate, if he went back. He might do something stupid. He might get roaring drunk. He isn’t ready to follow Harry down that path, and he isn’t ready to wipe his mind down, either. He isn’t ready forget and he never will be. John scratches at his back, presses his fingers lightly against the Browning. His gut twists two ways at once with the simultaneous comfort that comes with the sensation and the burning desire to draw the gun, just to feel it more, just to hear the faint _click_ of turning off the safety. Like a salivating dog John knows, _knows_ , that if he could just hear the sound, if he could just feel the grip of his weapon, they would be here and crouching up beside the building with him.

            John leans up against a café wall to calm his breathing, wills his hands into his jacket pockets.

            It’s time to go back.

            He’ll stare at his blog for a while, so that he can tell Ella he tried to write something. Maybe he’ll say that he went for a walk. He did do that. And he’ll go see Ella tomorrow, and next week, and the week after that, because he’ll go round the bend if he can’t stay in London.

            Then again, he might do either way.

  


            John nudges his way back into his bedsit and deposits his cane beside the desk, logging back into his laptop. Sod the blog, maybe he’ll just stare at his desktop screen. Or maybe he’ll pull up some porn; he’s pretty sure he missed that at some point, before he realized he could get by just fine without. He pulls up the window he’d had open this morning, when he’d checked his email. He’s got a few new messages: spam, spam, spam, and—oh. And one that might actually be something sent from a human being. He hopes it isn’t another invitation to some sodding social networking site. Blogging is bad enough. John opens the message.

            _Hey, mate. Heard you were back._

And here, John thinks, it is.

            _Not sure you remember me. We were at Sandhurst together. Alamein Company._

            Maybe not.

            _I’d be that inconveniently tall bloke who always sat in front of you just to get on your wick. We went out for a pint a couple times. Was hoping now you’re back you’d be up for more of the same. If you’re anything like how I was when I got back, you’re bored as balls right now._

            As if, John, thinks, he isn’t right now. Maybe he’s found—something. Got some sort of an idea how the bloody hell he’s supposed to do a damned thing with himself now that he’s out.

            _I’m going to be around the British Museum tomorrow, so what’s say we regroup at 1600 by Holborn Station, at the Princess Louise._

            John swallows a knot down his throat.

_Cheers,_  
_Sebastian Moran_

John remembers the name. He even remembers, he thinks, somebody’s stupidly broad shoulders, which he could never manage to see over, and an equally wide grin the once or twice they found themselves in the same place at the same time. At 1600, John rereads—but  he’s got his appointment with—well. John pulls up a new draft.

            _Ella,_  
 _Meeting with a friend tomorrow afternoon. Will have to cancel this week’s session._  
 _John Watson_

She’ll be pleased enough with that. Probably grill him about it later, but he’ll just have to deal with that when it comes.

            Tomorrow afternoon, though, John will walk into walk into Holt’s favorite place (and what a maddening, interesting coincidence, that), and he’ll round the corner and whether he remembers what Sebastian looks like or not, he’ll suddenly see someone with an extra dimension that no one else has got, and he’ll know it’s him. And they’ll have their pint, and their glasses will clunk onto the table empty, and they’ll spend half an hour in silence and know.

            The corners of John’s mouth pull up. _Moran,_ he thinks. _Thank god._


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Are you going to get anything to drink?”
> 
> “Nah. Better not. I’ve got work tonight.”
> 
> “Huh,” John allows himself a lopsided grin. “You know, I thought I recalled you were one of those ‘damn the consequences’ sort of blokes. Am I thinking of somebody else, or what?”
> 
> “Nah, that’s me. But my boss don’t like it much when I work drunk, and I can’t say I wanna get fired.”
> 
> “What do you do?”
> 
> Sebastian chews on his toothpick. “Tough to explain. Here, anyway.” He leans in with his own lopsided grin. “But basically I fuck over people who deserve it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I really did not intend to go this long without updating, but time kind of got away from me, sorry. Classes and stuff. Egh. My original intent was to write shorter chapters, more frequently...so this one's a bit short. Sorry 'bout that. 
> 
> Thank you to [Chucksauce](http://archiveofourown.org/users/chucksauce/pseuds/chucksauce) for the beta-ing. :)

            John taps his leg restlessly.

            He’s early. At least, he hopes he’s early, or else his assumption that he and Moran would be able to find each other based on pure military intuition is completely unfounded. He orders a beer, then thinks better of it and orders two, and then thinks better of it again and decides to drink them both.

            “Got a bit of a head start, I see,” says a rough but amused voice as somebody slides into the booth seat across from him.

            “Er,” says John, and stops, because something has gotten in the way of the rest of his words.

            Sebastian Moran—probably Sebastian, definitely Sebastian—gives John an appraising look, a scan, a _let’s see, how long have you been out?_ or a _let’s see, how horribly have you adjusted?_ scan, or maybe something else entirely; John’s a bit too distracted by the thing blocking his throat to judge for certain.

           What it is, this thing, this block, is the way the whole of Sebastian Moran’s being juts out into reality and reduces the dimensionality of the customers walking in through the door. John feels his own chest expand as air that he never knew was missing is sucked back into his lungs and he bursts from his surroundings, too. He can feel the blood running through his veins pick up the faint stinging warm of adrenaline at Sebastian’s smirk, even though there’s no way in hell the pub is going to become a warzone anytime soon, even though John won’t have any use for the gun tucked in the back of his trousers, hidden by his jacket. It will go to nil, that adrenaline, John thinks, but his nostrils flare at the idea that his body can still produce that rush by some other means than staring at the gun in the drawer of his desk every morning and testing whether he can work himself up to…to whatever it is, exactly, that people do with guns at seven in the morning in lonely London bedsits.

           Sebastian settles himself in, hunching forward conspiratorially. No, John thinks, not conspiratorially—more like a bibliophile facing an unread book. As Sebastian leans forward, John can make out even in the dim lighting the fainter tones of a scar on his face, probably from shrapnel. (Shrapnel, John thinks: an extremely polite word for bits of the armored car your buddies were in or for places where you used to feel at least marginally safer.)

           John leans back in turn, licking his lips as he processes the return of his senses, as if it was never blood that sustained them, but adrenaline. The table regains a texture that John had failed to note yesterday. He closes his eyes, blinking slowly, when Sebastian reaches out and wraps a hand around John’s almost-empty second beer, as if what he is seeing is a hand coming out a movie screen. He blinks again. This might be the first time someone has reached _toward_ him since his time in hospital.

            John is fairly certain it is not the faint dizziness of his buzz that drags him through this vision; is fairly certain that the way the bottom third of his beer becomes more real as it slides down Sebastian’s throat, when he plucks it away from John and downs it, is not an illusion. John runs a hand through his hair. Maybe it _is_ the buzz.

            “Yeah,” John finally says, remembering that Sebastian had spoken. “Sorry about that.” He doesn’t really mean it. He means it more than he’s meant anything else he’s said for weeks.

            Sebastian chuckles, looks John over again and shakes his head knowingly. “Shit, you must’ve been gasping for it,” he says. John wonders, briefly, if he means John was gasping for the beer, and then concludes that no, no he doesn’t, because that is the sort of thing that another person would say, whereas Sebastian just sat down and finished off someone else’s drink before even introducing himself, and is therefore not another person.

            No, he means some other _it_ , something like John must’ve been sick of his paper-flatness. He means something like that John must’ve felt like an eagle-eyed bat-eared mute man up until just now; he means something like that John must’ve been dying to say something that means something—even if all it is, is _Sorry about that_.

            “Seb,” Sebastian finally says, as a point of clarification.

            “John,” says John, as if that’s necessary.

            “Buddy of mine says a buddy of yours called you Two-Ticks.”

            John wonders which buddy. He doesn’t really wonder which buddy. He desperately wants to know which buddy. What if it’s Holt? What if they’re in Holt’s favorite place in the world and Holt’s getting a right laugh from the afterlife knowing that at least there’s somebody else here in his pub with an idea of what a hard-on John’s got for danger?

           “Yeah,” says John, as Seb pulls a toothpick out of his pocket and starts chewing on it, letting the end outside his lips waggle.

_Two-Ticks. Toothpicks._

           John cracks a smile, and it is the most bizarre thing he’s felt in a month.

            They’re silent, for a while. John doesn’t try to count how long but he realizes his mind is running a beat in time to the toothpick waggles.

            “Are you going to get anything to drink?” John finally asks.

            “Nah,” says Seb. “Better not. I’ve got work tonight.”

            “Huh,” John allows himself a wider smile, which turns into a lopsided grin. “You know, I thought I recalled you were one of those ‘damn the consequences’ sort of blokes. Am I thinking of somebody else, or what?”

            “Nah, that’s me,” Seb says, “but my boss don’t like it much when I work drunk, and I can’t say I wanna get fired.”

            John tries to imagine a job from which he’d care if he were fired, and the only one he can think of is the one he can’t do anymore. “What do you do?”

            Seb chews on his toothpick. “Tough to explain. Here, anyway.” He leans in with his own lopsided grin. “But basically I fuck over people who deserve it.”

            “Shit,” John says, which feels lovely. “Fantastic. Like what? Police work? Some kind of government deal?”

            “Bit less official than that.”

            John should probably be wary but he’s warm and multidimensional and can’t be bothered at just this moment, so he simply grins.

            “What about you, mate?”

            “Nothing,” says John.

            “You were a doctor before, yeah?”

            “Yeah,” John says, and, “boring though, isn’t it?”

            “You tell me.”

            “Well, it is. Kind of a shit job, innit, telling mummy her son’s just got the sniffles so go home? At best something interesting happened about once a month. Why d’you think I enlisted?”

            “Right,” says Seb. “Just like I thought.”

            “What’s that?”

            “Well, you ain’t exactly glad to be back.”

            John sighs. “No. I’m not.” He leans back until his head thuds against the back of the booth. “I used to be useful. A _real_ kind of useful, you know?”

            “Oh, sure,” says Seb, stretching back. “I mean, how many jobs d’you figure there are that’re anything like being a sniper?”

            “I’d say about none,” says John. Sebastian chews on his toothpick. “But you found something, at least.”

            “Sure did,” says Seb.

            John looks up at the ceiling. He tries to imagine what Holt would be doing, if Holt were back here, back at home, or at least at what was technically defined as home. He’d studied physics, of all things. John tries to imagine what his resume would look like. _I aced Advanced Quantum Mechanics and I can’t get in a bar fight anymore without thinking of twenty ways to kill the bloke. On the upside, I shoot a gun like nobody’s business._

           He wouldn’t take an office job, or a sitting-down job, or a paperwork job—anything physics would be out, just as John continues failing to find work as a doctor not because he never gets an interview, but because he never applies. Holt would wander the streets like John, looking for something interesting to do with himself and never finding it. But at least then he and John could wander the streets together. It wouldn’t be half-bad, that. John could put up with seeing Ella for as long as he had to, to keep his bedsit in London, if Holt were here. Hell, they could share that sodding bedsit—space is overrated—and use what extra money there was between them reveling in not having to have a job.

            Except, John thinks, that they’d still be in the same place that John is in right now, itching to feel useful.

            “Maybe you could put in a good word with your boss,” John half jokes.

            Sebastian barks out a laugh.

            “Yeah,” says John, shaking his head, resigned, “all right. Figured not. Still, you know—what’m I supposed to do?”

            “Nah, that’s not it,” Seb says. “Just…fuck, you haven’t got the slightest clue what it is I do, is all. How’d you even know you want a word in at all?”

            John stares at his hand, which twitches ever so slightly and has been doing so since he returned to London. Ella thinks once John can calm himself a bit more, it won’t be a problem. John knows for a fact that he can’t calm himself another single ounce. But there are two types of calm: the serene view of a sunset on a still lake, and the eye of a storm. Still lakes are boring but wherever John looks there’s not a fucking storm to be found, and so until one crops up—if one crops up—he’s stuck staring at a setting sun. It’s roughly the most depressing thing he’s ever seen, and he’s seen a lot.

            “True,” John agrees. “That’s true. I guess I don’t know enough to say. But, hell, you like it, don’t you?”

            And he really doesn’t know Seb, or what kind of employment is up Seb’s street, except that he _knows_ Seb, because John’s watching him chew a perfect cadence out of a toothpick and right now he’s literally itching his trigger finger. He knows Seb because they’re both here. He knows Seb because Seb is not the other species that roams this city and is, it logically follows, of the same variety as John. There is not that much about Seb that could be different than it is, not without him being curled up and crying or killing himself.

            “You nosy tosser,” Seb says, as John continues to try to puzzle it out, what it is that requires so much secrecy and dismissive laughter.

            “I’m not being nosy.” John debates ordering them both dinner to make Seb stick around for longer, before he gets tired of John and leaves, because by all appearances John needs him a hell of a lot more than he needs John. “I haven’t been torturing you for details, or anything.” They both smirk wryly.

            “Yeah,” Seb says, “but you’re dying to know. I can tell.” Before John can speak, he says, “’Course you are. I remember how it was right when I came back, clear as day.” John has been meaning to ask him how it is he got discharged, and opens his mouth. Seb goes on, “Right miserable, it was. I’d have killed for somebody to talk to. Somebody _real,_ I mean.” He smirks to himself. “Anyway, that was when I met my boss.” Seb’s eyes lock with John’s. “Saw you were back and just thought I’d pass on the favor, give you somebody to talk to and all that. You feeling at least a little less suicidal, I hope?”

            “I wasn’t feeling suicidal,” John lies, and the fantastic thing is that they both know it’s a lie, too.

            “Homicidal, then?” Seb shifts in his seat slightly, and holds his gaze steady on John’s eyes. He cracks another smirk, but his muscles are tensed, ready. 

            John is about to laugh and then he hears the question again, and realizes he can’t hear it coming from his therapist, or from his friends from Before. He can hear it from anyone in his section, though. He can hear it from Sebastian. No one in his right mind asks how homicidal a man is feeling any way other than jokingly. John savors it for just a minute, lets it marinate in his brain; not the sentiment, but the intent. He swallows it down out of his mind and it fills him like a bread baking in the pit of his stomach, growing and then dissolving again to nourish him; it is nothing like _Did you write in your blog yesterday, John?_ or _How are the nightmares?_ It’s not like _What happened to you?_ or _Do you need a bit of a rest?_

“Nah,” John finally says. He curls and uncurls his fingers.

            “Better than me, then,” Seb grins. John isn’t sure what that means. He isn’t sure he cares.

           Of course he cares.

            But not in a storming-out-of-the-pub sort of way, god no, because right about then the world will flatten back up, unexpectedly and without warning, and John will trip all over it, and tear it in places, and run back to his flat and be exactly zero paces from where he started this morning, and it would be the exact reverse of what he did before he left: he would walk in the door and look in the mirror and any remnants of an almost-smile would vanish. He’d muss up his hair and frown and erase the email he’d typed up to Sebastian and retch up his breakfast and pull his gun from the back of his trousers and set it on the nightstand. He’d stare at it as he stripped down and climbed into bed and laid there for an hour, heaving with panic before he was sucked back into sleep like bullets sucked back into his gun, like light sucking back into explosives, like his men sucking up from the ground.

            “Mate,” Seb says quietly. He leans across the table and taps his fingers right next to John’s hand, letting the vibrations wake him up from his trance.

            John shakes his head, closing his eyes and breathing deeply. “Thanks.”

            Seb grins. “You are fucked up in the head, Johnny Boy.”

            “Oh, like you can talk. You just admitted to feeling homicidal.”

            Sebastian shrugs one shoulder and lets the toothpick drop to the corner of his mouth. “There’s worse things to be.”

            “Just don’t go into work and hold a gun to your boss’ head,” John finds himself mirroring Seb’s grin.

            “He’d probably give me a raise.”

            John raises his eyebrows and then shakes his head, laughing. “Oh, right. So, he’s one of…”

            “…Us?” Seb finishes, before John even realizes that’s what he was going to say. “Not in the way you’re thinking.”

            “How d’you mean, then?”

            “I mean in the ‘people that give psychologists either nightmares or stiffies’ sort of way.”

            “Oh,” John says. He suspects with Ella he is more on the nightmares end of the spectrum. “Right.”

            “Anyway,” Seb continues. “He’s pretty fucking secretive. Even people who work for him ain’t likely to see much of him, but _damn_ does he keep an eye on his employees.” John imagines swiveling CCTV cameras, wonders if it’s serious enough that they’ll start following John around, too, when he leaves the pub. “But he won’t give a damn if you wanna come along with me tonight.”

            John feels his blood rush up toward the surface of his skin. “You’ve having me on,” he says quietly, calmly. Center-of-storms calm.

            “Nah, mate. Assuming you don’t plan on telling anyone about it.”

            John laughs at this.

            “Didn’t think so.”

            “What are you doing, exactly?”

            Seb pulls out his mobile, swirls his toothpick around the insides of his lips as he drags his finger across the screen for several moments. He shakes his head, chortling to himself. “Reassigned me, the fucker. All right. On the menu tonight,” Seb says, lowering his voice to a growl through his teeth, “is vandalism.”

            John leans back slightly, finds his lips tightening to a narrow line. “Vandalism,” he mutters to himself. “What _do_ you do?”

            “Like I said, I fuck over people who deserve it.” Seb puts the phone away and stands, frowning at John’s expression. “Oh, don’t be such a pussy. It’s fucking fake art he oughtn’t be selling that we’re gonna fuck up. Does that make you feel better?”

            It does, actually. John shrugs and stands up as well, before he can even really think about it. “I’ve got nothing better to do,” he says. He can hear quickly pumping blood rushing through his ears; it sounds like wind surrounding him, beating ferociously at the surface of the still lake which once reflected the sunset but, in the whipping of the wind, shows only chopping waves of sunset hues, of fire.

            “Damn straight,” says Seb. He picks up a bag John had failed to register when he’d first appeared and throws it over his shoulder. “Now follow me. We’ve got a bit of a walk to make, and with your slow-arse hobbling, not enough time to make it in.”

            “I’ll show you slow-arse hobbling,” John says, and stuffs his cane into Seb’s arms, and strides out the door, the eye of a storm of unknown magnitude and direction but, sod that, the eye of a bloody storm.


End file.
